"Detroit Part 1"

Ghostly International

Artists:

Ann Arbor native Zach Saginaw, who records under his middle name Shigeto, has spent the past three years creating amorphous, knob-turning, acid jazz-infused pocket symphonies with releases on Moodgadget and Ghostly International. His most recent work, 2012's sophomore album Lineage, explored pastoral patchworks of glitchy IDM that bubbled with undercurrents of hip-hop beats and muted MF Doom-like samples. Saginaw returns to the fray with “Detroit Part 1”-- from No Better Time Than Now, out August 20 on Ghostly-- a track that ebbs and flows with a sturdy hip-hop breakbeat at its center.

The mosaic qualities of Saginaw’s previous work remain, but the cacophony of burping synths, organs, and disintegrated percussion loops don’t coagulate into a throbbing mass like they did on Lineage. Instead, each piece of “Detroit Part 1” gets its own sonic space, distinctly building on top of one another with just enough jazzy influence to blur the edges. It’s a track that screams for a similarly fragmented MC--say Serengeti or Aesop Rock--to throw down some loopy, non-sequitur rhymes on a remix.